Opening of the international exhibition "Ritual and Memory: The Ancient Balkans and Beyond" at New York University

The National Museum of Romanian History has announced the opening of the international exhibition Ritual and Memory: The Ancient Balkans and Beyond, a cultural event held in New York at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU that also features ancient artifacts from Romanian museums.

The exhibition is part of the international cultural project entitled The First Kings of Europe, which is being organized in three major cities – New York and Chicago in the USA, and Gatineau in Canada. It is a unique, large-scale project initiated by the Field Museum, Chicago in collaboration with more than 20 other museums in South-East and Central Europe.

This international exhibition, presented for the first time in North American museums, brings together important cultural objects from the collections of museum institutions in Romania, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.

Ritual and Memory: The Ancient Balkans and Beyond presents, together with other exceptional exhibits from other museum collections in the above-mentioned countries, a selection of 60 pre- and protohistoric artifacts - dating from the Neolithic, Bronze Age, and up to the Second Iron Age - from the collections of several Romanian museums.

For Romania, the coordinator of the exhibition project is the National Museum of Romanian History (MNIR), which is collaborating with five other museum institutions, namely the National Museum of Transylvanian History (Cluj), the Neamț National Museum Complex (Piatra Neamt), the Museum of the Gumelnița Civilisation (Oltenița), the Oltenia Museum (Craiova), and the Buzau County Museum (Buzău).

Benefiting from temporary loans of cultural goods from the heritage of some European countries, the Ritual and Memory exhibition offers a special opportunity for specialists and the North American public to discover pre- and protohistoric archaeological artifacts from the region between the Carpathian Mountains and the Balkan Mountains.

Although many American museums hold in their collections heritage objects belonging to the ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Near and Far Eastern civilizations, pre- and protohistoric artifacts from South-Eastern Europe are rarely exhibited in this cultural environment.

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World invites visitors to this exhibition to discover the beliefs, ritual practices, and community organization in these civilizations of Southeastern Europe from before the first written records, and to explore a much broader view of the significant contacts and connections of the pre- and protohistoric civilizations of this dynamic area.